Karnataka: Horns bring dilemma for smaller cities too

Karnataka State Pollution Control Board chairman Vamanacharya’s recent statement about bringing down noise levels in Bangalore by checking the honking of vehicles has served to focus on the menace of indiscriminate use of horns by private bus operators in other cities and towns in Karnataka.

With no check on sound pollution by authorities such as police and RTO, honking has reached unbearable levels in cities and towns other than Bangalore. The cutthroat competition among private bus operators has unleashed a war of horns in cities like Mangalore, Mysore, Shimoga, Chitradurga, Madikeri and Udupi, where bus operators have been using shrill horns for more than two decades with no restraining influence.

“The private bus operators hire drivers and conductors who have no formal training or education about public safety and traffic rules. The owners’ control over driver and conductors does not go beyond receiving the daily collection.

With no checks on them, the bus staff violate all traffic safety rules in their haste to pick up passengers, using horns as a means to attract passengers,” says president of Nagarika Hitarakshana Vedike Hanumanth Kamath.

Neither the police nor the transport officers do anything to bring down the menace of shrill horns, and the KSPCB should step in to check such sound pollution by disciplining the bus crew, say environmental activists Dinesh Nayak and Norbert D’Souza.

“Shrill horns are definitely a violation of human rights. They unnerve other road users, specially women and children, and enrage other motorists, apart from violating noise pollution norms,” says PB D’Sa, state president of the People’s Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL).

He urged the KSPCB to impose a blanket ban on using vacuum horns (klaxons). “We have made several appeals to the Regional Transport Authority in Mangalore, but it appears that the bus owners’ lobby is stronger than any citizens’ movement, and we are now contemplating approaching the human rights commission against the use of shrill horns,” D’Sa said.

The problem is equally odious in rural Mysore. Activists say that the problem is not that acute in Mysore city, where the KSRTC had monopoly over the routes, but in the interior of the district where private bus owners operate, especially in Kollegal-Nanjangud sector, shrill horns are being used excessively, say activists.